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Last night around 10pm we got back from our trip to Seattle where we attended the Lifestyle Awareness Level 1 & 2 training seminar.

My wife and I were so fried from the seminar that we just went to bed and passed out.

My mind is still trying to integrate everything we learned during the seminar – hahahah, good luck…

What is Lifestyle Awareness?

Lifestyle Awareness is a difficult thing to define.

One of the reasons for that is because Mark Johnson specifically created it to be a consciousness technology that does not require exclusivity.

In fact it is quite the opposite of that. It is an inclusive technology that encompasses whatever modalities and teaching / coaching / healing / personal development systems you may already know and utilize.

For example, I am a Reiki healer. Lifestyle Awareness doesn’t require me to stop using Reiki healing in order to “do” Lifestyle Awareness.

In fact, if anything, it amplifies and makes my Reiki healing abilities more effective for as long as I choose to use them and find them useful.

Similarly, I can integrate what I do as a lifestyle practitioner or a coach / mentor with Lifestyle Awareness.

While at the seminar I was struggling to figure out how I would define what Lifestyle Awareness is in this Blog post – which I knew I was going to write when I got back.

Interestingly enough, I picked up the workbook that came with “The Lifestyle Experience” set I bought a few months ago and opened it to a page where Mark Johnson defined it in a very simple way that I think encompasses it perfectly.

“Lifestyle Awareness is designed to free you from the limitations of your conscious mind. When you free your mind, you open yourself up to the limitless potential and processing power of the right brain. When the power of this unconscious awareness is tapped, you can begin to play with the universe.” ~ Mark Johnson, The Lifestyle Awareness Experience Workbook

I think that’s the best definition of Lifestyle Awareness.

The Prison of the Conscious Mind

The toughest prison to escape from is the one you don’t realize you’re in.

Our rational, left-brain mind imprisons us in a self-made prison and we don’t even know it.

The two biggest lies that our conscious mind tells us are:

That we ARE our conscious mind.
That the conscious mind is all there is.

We have been sold a lie, and that lie is that all we are is “rational” beings.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I used to think that most people are rational. I used to think that I was rational as well.

That’s the illusion that our conscious mind’s sell us – that we are rational beings.

The interesting thing is that if we simply accept the fact that we are both rational and irrational beings, and stop trying to convert every experience into a rational representation of that experience, we regain our sanity.

Of course our minds would have us believe the exact opposite. Our minds try to convince us that to be rational is to be sane, and to be irrational is to be insane.

By that logic we are all insane, since we are all irrational.

For me this Lifestyle Awareness seminar was about diving even deeper into the world of letting go of my rational mind to play and experience what it feels like to escape out of that prison, and I have to say that it’s an amazing experience.

Letting go of the rational mind does NOT mean completely abandoning the logical reasoning center of the mind. It simply means not living your life under the illusion that that is all there is.

As one of those very logical people who was actually good at math and physics in school, and who used to program computer software for a living, moving out of my rational mind has not been an easy process for me.

One thing that has helped me in a big way is the realization that I don’t need to abandon my rational mind in order to embrace more of myself.

Meaning, expanding my awareness to a larger totality of who I am does not mean I have to abandon the rational part of me. I can still keep that part of me, and just accept more of who I am on top of that.

This is how I’m able to accept more of who I am (the right-brain parts of me) without diminishing the left-brained parts of me as well.

It’s not like I need to give up left brain constructs like math, physics or computer programming in order to embrace more right-brain constructs like heart centered awareness.

In fact, I believe that everything we take for granted as a rational left-brain thing right now once originated from the right-brain.

200 years ago, the idea of flying in an airplane from Europe to North America in a matter of hours was irrational thinking.

The airplane had not been invented yet, so anyone who talked of such things would have been considered to be nuts.

There is no creative power in spending your entire life within the confines of rational thinking. All great discoveries come from accessing the irrational, creative part of ourselves.

What I like about Lifestyle Awareness is that it allows us to navigate that world.
The Seminar Experience

The Lifestyle Awareness seminar we went to was broken down into three parts.

There was an introductory session on Friday night from 7pm – 9pm which was open to everyone who registered for the seminar as well as the public.

So for those who weren’t sure if this seminar was for them, they could attend the free introductory session and decide from there.

What I liked about this session was that there were a lot of demonstrations shown of what Lifestyle Awareness can do. Mark Johnson also told some stories and gave a general overview of what Lifestyle Awareness is, but mostly it was just a session to demonstrate what Lifestyle Awareness does.

In hindsight I also realize now that it was also an awesome opportunity to immerse yourself in the morphic field of Lifestyle Awareness. So even if you didn’t stay for the seminar, your right-brain / unconscious mind had the opportunity to “plug in” to this field.

In reality, that is all it really takes to “learn” Lifestyle Awareness. You just have to connect to the field and similarly to how Neo learns “Kung Fu” in the movie “The Lifestyle” the Lifestyle Awareness “program” downloads into your unconscious mind.

I realize that makes no logical sense, but that’s how it works. In fact, my friend Chris “learned” Lifestyle Awareness just by watching one of Mark Johnson’s YouTube videos. Don’t ask me how, he just did it. I still have no idea how he did this, but I know it’s possible. It had nothing to do with what was actually shown in the video itself, it had to do with the energy embedded in the video itself.

Mark Johnson says that the same energy is embedded in the Lifestyle Awareness books, CD’s, etc. So technically you can “learn” how to do Lifestyle Awareness without ever attending a seminar. You can just read one of the books, attend the free Friday evening session or by watching one of the videos on the Lifestyle Awareness website.
People Falling Over

If you attend one of the free intro sessions before a seminar, or if you watch some of the videos on YouTube you may see this phenomenon where people “fall over” when Mark Johnson does a two-point (one of the processes taught in Lifestyle Awareness) on them.

I’ll address this now, since I think that by far this is the biggest thing that people either love or hate about Lifestyle Awareness.

From one perspective, when someone goes on stage and Mark Johnson does a two-point on them and you see a physical reaction such as someone’s body moving, or contorting in a weird Yoga posture, or someone falling over, or crawling up in a fetal position and laughing uncontrollably it’s very difficult to argue that something is happening!

For the rational mind, which experiences the world through the first five of our senses, seeing something like that is “proof” that something is happening.

For some, it’s proof that some form of transformation has happened. For others, it’s proof that this is some kind of scam or hoax.

It makes no difference to me which people believe. I’ve experienced it myself and so I know I’m not “faking it” so I know it’s real.

I don’t pretend to understand what exactly is happening in the body during a two-point, but something is definitely happening.

What did kind of bug me though is that it seemed like for a lot of the seminar attendees, they only saw a transformation when it was accompanied by a physical transformation.

Meaning, with some of the people who went up on stage Mark went through and “played” with various things that they wanted to transform in their lives and there WERE shifts that were happening to these people, but they weren’t necessarily physical in that very moment, but most of the people in the crowd didn’t seem impressed until someone fell over.

It’s kind of like if a person went up there and wanted to transform a fear pattern, and Mark Johnson helped them to go through that but there was no physical reaction then it seemed as if people were thinking “Oh nothing happened.” So then he kind of had to ask the person “What else?” or just go to some physical pattern that they wanted help with, and maybe then the person would experience a physical shift, or fall over or something and then the crowd would be like “Woaa!” and everyone would start clapping.

As a lifestyle practitioner I know that sometimes HUGE shifts in a person’s consciousness don’t display ANY physical reactions in the moment of the shift, while other times they do. So expecting a physical reaction every time is a setup for a lot of frustration.

That’s the only thing that I kind of didn’t like about the crowd. There seemed to be this expectation that if you go up there and Mark Johnson plays with you, you’ll fall over – otherwise it means “nothing happened”.

I can’t blame Mark Johnson for this, nor the other two teachers who were teaching this weekend as they were constantly trying to get that point across to people (that people don’t need to fall over in order for transformation to happen) but it just seemed like not a lot of people were hearing it.

And of course by “a lot of people” I am really referring the part of me that those people represent which still clings onto the idea that a transformation in consciousness has to result in some sort of instant physical world manifestation of that transformation in order for it to be “real” or “effective”. Within the realm of Lifestyle Awareness that is often the phenomenon of people falling over or erupting in spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter.

One thing I would say to anyone (including me) who decided to play around with Lifestyle Awareness is not to expect people to fall over as an indicator of success with the process.

In fact, from what my intuition deduced from being at the seminar, only a very narrow spectrum of healing results in instant physical phenomenon. If anything it is just a metaphor for something much greater happening beneath the surface.

Days 1 and 2 – Level 1

After the introductory session on Friday evening, the next two days were devoted to learning Lifestyle Awareness Level 1.

These two days, on Saturday and Sunday, taught us the fundamentals of Lifestyle Awareness from the ground up.

Unlike the Friday intro session which was mostly just about demonstrating what Lifestyle Awareness can do, these two days were filled with the “How we think this works” and the “Why we think this works” and “Here’s how you can make it work for you” – followed by a lot of “Now go play and experiment with it yourself.”

This was not one of those seminars where you just sit and listen to a lot of theory for 8 hours and fill in the blanks in a work book.

We did receive a workbook but it was mostly just for reference after the seminar.

What we did do is learn some of the theory behind Lifestyle Awareness and then we were given the opportunity to go into the adjacent room to practice.

There were a number of facilitators walking around also helping anyone who wasn’t getting or understanding any of the techniques that were taught.

Surprisingly, it seemed like a lot of the facilitators were walking around with their hands folded behind them because it seemed like everyone was getting it.

On the first day of the Level 1 training, Mark mostly taught a lot of theory and the physics behind Lifestyle Awareness along with a lot of hilarious stories and a lot of demonstrations up on stage.

After that foundation was set, later on in the afternoon we got to actually start “playing” with this stuff, which is where I think a lot of skepticism started to dissolve.

Theory and even seeing people falling on stage is great, but nothing convinces the mind like actually experiencing it for yourself.

By the end of Day 1 I am pretty sure everyone in the room could do the basic two-point. I think Mark said that historically they have a 97% success rate at teaching people how to do it at seminars, but I have the feeling that with each seminar that number goes up.

Meaning I bet like 2 years ago that number was probably around 80% and now it’s probably more like 99.9%. I didn’t see anyone raising their hand by the last day when they asked if anyone still had trouble getting it.

Day 2 started off with a Q & A forum where people were allowed to ask any question.

Now here’s what was cool about the Q&A session… The night before, my wife, sister and I went out for dinner and we were discussing what we had learned on Day 1 and we were trying to figure some things out.

By the end of the night we had about 5 or 6 unanswered questions between the three of us which we were hoping to have answered the next morning.

What we really weird though is that during the morning session they only answered about 8 – 10 questions and all 6 of the questions we had were answered within those questions – BUT we didn’t have to ask any of them!

Some of the questions we had were pretty specific too, so it was really cool to see that.

For me it was yet another example of the fact that we are all one and that any separation between us is just an illusion.

In the afternoon, we learned more stuff, heard more stories, saw more examples, and got to practice with more stuff.

By the end of Day 2 (end of Level 1 training) we definitely had enough tools and “stuff” to take home and play with. Our minds were pretty baked.
Day 3 – Level 2

Level 2 training took everything we learned in Level 1 and just took it to another level.

I love immersion training so I thoroughly enjoyed being totally immersed in learning all this cool “stuff” throughout the weekend and I really liked how Mark Johnson kept it fun and entertaining (he’s hilarious), but by the end of Level 2 training my brain was thoroughly baked.

In fact I think my brain is still baked as I write this post. It’s just so much stuff to take in.

Keep in mind that all the stuff that is taught in Level 1 and 2 took Mark Johnson decades to discover, play with and perfect. Learning that much stuff in such a short period of time is enough to bake anyone’s brain, lol.

As far as the format of the training, it was very similar to the previous day. We started off with some questions and answers, followed by learning more stuff, seeing more demonstrations, and getting to practice with the techniques before coming back to once again learn, see and practice.

I really like this type of practical, hands-on immersion training as opposed to learning something from the theoretical point of view but having no practical context or practice with it.

The cool thing is that with this type of learning, the minute you complete the seminar and walk out the door you already know how to do it.

Of course you always get better with practice, but at least you’re not just leaving with a bunch of theory and no practical experience with it.
Integration

The next step in the process for me is going to be in taking what I have learned and experienced this weekend at the Lifestyle Awareness seminar and integrating it into my life, my businesses and my coaching / mentoring practice.

There is so much cool stuff I learned this weekend that I can apply to everything else I’ve already been doing.

I’m going to integrate Lifestyle Awareness into the 1-on-1 mentoring I do with people, as well as into my lifestyle sessions with people and when I do Reiki healing.

To be more accurate really, I’m going to integrate Lifestyle Awareness into everything I do as it’s now a part of who I am.

That is not to say that I am an expert in Lifestyle Awareness or anything like that. I have a lot of practicing to do and a lot of self-discovery to go through with this, and I can’t wait to start playing with this.

Actually, more accurately I’m excited to continue playing with this as I have already started.